Ellis: Texas unable to prove ID law won’t discriminate

A Texas state senator who opposed Voter ID legislation doubts the U.S. Justice Department can allow the law to take effect considering the state’s inability to prove it won’t harm minority voters.

Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston

Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade sent a report to the Justice Department last week in response to the agency’s request for data on how many minority registered voters lacked Texas driver’s licenses. But the data is hard to determine. Andrade emphasized in her letter the state’s “reservations about the reliability of that data.”

“This data does not provide an accurate picture of the racial makeup of registered voters or ID holders in Texas,” she wrote in the letter to the Justice Department.

The Justice Department needs to “turn the state of Texas down because either the state knew that the Voter ID restrictions would have a negative impact on minority voters – or, they didn’t care,” Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, said.

Questions about the impact of the bill during Senate debate were routinely answered with assurances that the Secretary of State had the information, Ellis said, “giving us an impression that there was an answer and we would be pleased with the answer.”

People who give assurances like that need to back it up, Ellis said.

“I think the Justice Department will take a very deliberative approach and turn it down,” Ellis said. “The burden is on the state to prove it will not have a disparate impact on minority voters. If you say that it won’t have a disparate impact and you don’t have the data, I don’t see any way the Justice Department could approve of these voter suppression measures going into effect in Texas.”

The Justice Department has “60 days to make a determination,” agency spokesman Xochitl Hinojosa said Tuesday.

Ellis contends the Voter ID law passed in Texas and several other states was cooked up by “a right-wing think tank” as a way to suppress votes.

Texas Republicans pushed the Voter ID bill, which they said was necessary to assure ballot security.

Several other states with GOP majorities approved similar legislation.

The law requires either a DPS driver’s license, a U.S. passport, a military ID, a Texas concealed handgun permit or a DPS ID card for voting. Student ID cards issued by a state university would not be valid for voting.

The law provides free DPS election ID cards for Texans who can get to a DPS office. But there are 34 Texas counties without a DPS office and 46 additional counties where the DPS has been closed with no time table for reopening, according to an Advancement Project report.

And the Brennan Center For Justice report indicates that about 1 million African American and Latino voting-age citizens would have to travel more than 10 miles to get to the closest Texas drivers license office.

Texas does not require Texans to provide their race or ethnicity when registering to vote. Before May 2010, DPS did not list “Hispanic” as a race/ethnic group that applicants for a driver’s license for personal ID card could select.

The state of Texas could only provide a “good-faith attempt” to provide the Justice Department with statistics about registered voters without driver’s licenses. But the data “is not fully reliable and is misleading,” according to Andrade’s letter.

The state of Texas cannot meet its burden of proof “that the law would not discriminate against people of color,” Ellis said.

Attorney General Eric Holder defended voting rights at a speech last month at the LBJ School on the University of Texas at Austin campus. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law nearly 50 years ago.

Ellis sees Holder’s speech as “a signal” that the Justice Department will be reluctant to sign off on any legislation that discourages voting.